FF Advert

FF Advert is a quirky and good-natured humanist sans serif family for text in four weights. Its design is an homage to W. A. Dwiggins’ Metro. Like Metro, it only offers upright styles – there are no italics. FF Advert is appreciated by graphic designers for including two unique lowercase ‘a’ forms in each font: single-story and double-story versions.

The typeface comes from Dutch designer Just van Rossum. There is a sister design as well: FF Advert Rough. This family includes five roughened variations of FF Advert Bold, in progressive degrees of thickness. All variations have the same width, so they can be layered on top of each other as though they formed a colorful, mind-expanding cake. The most interesting things happen when you slightly shift and/or rotate the stacked weights.

Noel Gallagher’s statement that reading fiction is a “fucking waste of time” and readers are “putting themselves a tiny little bit above the rest of us” – is a valuable contribution.

Cathy Nicol: Isle of Joy

Vince Smith met bandmates Jim Kelly and Nancy Gibbs at a Sex Pistols concert, where he tried to kiss Sid Vicious’ guitar and got a bloody nose. Together they formed Aftershock, and for a while they made a lot of noise, a bit of money and caused a sensation wherever they went.